***
When I woke up and looked around, I knew
exactly where I was. On Middle Island in the Ohio River, the place where I had
first encountered Blue Boyle in his massive form, the place where I had
realized that Dr. Eastbrook, the father of my best friend, Harriet, was a
dangerous man—to say the least.
I looked over at John, who also seemed to
be coming out of a daze of some kind.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Ohio River. Middle Island.”
“What … why?”
I told him.
Then Mr. Leon spoke. “I thought it might
be a good plan,” he said, “to take a look at the places where we know Dr.
Eastbrook has been in the past. Returning to the scene of the crime—that sort
of thing.”
Not a bad idea, I thought.
And so we wandered around the part of the
island where I’d first discovered something horrible was going on, where I’d
barely survived the encounter that I wrote about in the first volume of these
adventures.
We found the spot where I’d accidentally
discovered Dr. Eastbrook and Blue Boyle digging at an old gravesite.
And the old grave was still there—looking once
again undisturbed. We examined the area
around it but did not see anything that resembled any recent activity.
“Not here,” mumbled Mr. Leon. “Not here.”
And so we walked the short distance back
to the Karmann Ghia. Once again we struggled into our seats, the engine roared
to life, and I once again passed out with the force of our acceleration.
***
When I woke this time, I knew
where we were. On Lake Erie’s Green Island, that small, uninhabited island with
an abandoned lighthouse. It was a place Harriet and I had found our lives in
danger because of Blue Boyle. And Harriet’s own father.
“But wait a second,” I said to Mr. Leon.
“How did we get a car on this island? No ferry comes—”
“Never underestimate a Karmann Ghia,” he
replied.
“I think I’m having a Back-to-the-Future
experience,” said John.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I
looked at him, feeling as if I were a cartoon character with question marks
instead of eyes.
“Those movies,” he said. “Three of them?”[i]
“I don’t go to movies,” I said. “We’ve
never owned a television.”
“Your loss,” sighed John. “The films were
fun—they’re about a kid and a weird scientist who has a car that can
time-travel, and—”
Mr. Leon had apparently had enough. “Are
you two going to have some kind of debate about movies? Or are we going to take
a look around the old lighthouse?”
And that was one of those questions that
answer themselves.
***
We slowly made our way through the
underbrush until we arrived at the ruins of the lighthouse. The closer we got
to it, the more clearly I remembered what had happened there. Dr. Eastbrook had
set up another laboratory inside, and he was devastated when he discovered that
Harriet and I had once again found him. We had not really been looking for him,
but we had been sort of abandoned on Green Island … and by then I have to admit
that I had begun to cease believing in coincidence.
Harriet and I had barely escaped with our
lives. Dr. Eastbrook somehow got away—though we would encounter him again,
later on, at Niagara Falls … I can’t say more.
The lighthouse still stood—though looking
even worse than it had not all that long ago. More overgrown, more fractured—as if
it might at any moment collapse in upon itself. Implode is the word. The
perfect word.
We carefully made our way toward it, found
the door newly fastened with a sturdy looking combination lock.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Open it,” said Mr. Leon. “You know the
combination.”
“I do? I don’t think I—”
“Give it a try,” he smiled.
I walked up to the lock and looked at it.
The dial was large—featured one hundred numbers. I saw no way. I knew enough
math to realize that my chances of getting those three numbers in the right
sequence were approximately one in a hundred times one in 99 times one in 98
times …. A huge number.
But I put my hand on the dial, and
suddenly three numbers were in my head: 8-30-97. I spun the dial to those
numbers (right, left, right), and the lock clicked open!
I looked over at John, who was staring at
me as if he’d just witnessed the appearance of some sort of being from another
dimension.
“How did you do that?” he said.
“I have no idea. I was just standing there
when those three numbers appeared in my head.”
And Mr. Leon said, “Vickie, tell him what
those three numbers mean.”
“They mean
something?” asked John.
“It’s the birthday of Mary Godwin,” I
said. “August 30, 1797.”
“Who on earth is Mary Godwin?” he asked.
“She became Mary Shelley,” I said, “and
she wrote—”
“Frankenstein,” said John. “Who’s
the scientist, not the creature,” he added with a smile.
***
Inside, upstairs, the lighthouse was in
better shape than its outward appearance had led us to believe. I remembered
that Dr. Eastbrook had set up quite an elaborate laboratory there, and he had,
because of Harriet and me, been forced to make a hurried retreat. Although it
was clear the authorities had been through the space—removing things—a lot
remained.
Mr. Leon said, “This looks a lot better
than I’d expected.”
Was something still going on here? I wondered.
Then we heard a woman’s voice coming from
downstairs—a woman’s voice that I instantly recognized.
Aunt Claire.
***
Aunt Claire.
Not a real aunt. No, Claire Wahl had been
my babysitter years before. A strange woman who had, mysteriously, showed up to
help my widowed father. A strange woman who seemed to live nowhere. (I had
followed Aunt Claire one day when she had left our house—and ended up learning
not a thing.) She had disappeared in a way that seemed as if she had stepped
from the pages of The Wizard of Oz.
Speaking of Wizard, later, a tornado
struck our little town of Franconia just as my father, Harriet, and I were
driving back into town after our adventure on Lake Erie. Bizarrely, the only
home damaged was our house. And Harriet’s mother told us she had seen
something … impossible. As that tornado lifted back up in the sky, Aunt Claire
rose out of our chimney—much more slowly than if the tornado had caused her to rise.
Her clothing flew off to reveal … a skeleton. And, said Mrs. Eastbrook, Aunt
Claire seemed to be crying out in joy, not in fear.[ii]
I had never seen her again.
Not until now. And there she stood in that
Green Island lighthouse. She didn’t look a moment older than she’d looked when
I had last seen her.
“Aunt Claire! What are you—?”
“You seem to need a lot of help these days,”
she said, gesturing toward Mr. Leon. Who smiled.
“And this,” continued Aunt Claire, “must
be John.”
John looked even more befuddled than he’d
seemed all day. “Who is this woman?”he asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. (And I
did.)
Aunt Claire had us all sit down—and I was
ready to do that, believe me. When we were all settled, she said,
“You’re looking for your father.”
“Yes!” I cried. “Do you know where he is?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess I was
doing the same thing you were doing—returning to the sites where strange things
had happened—maybe some clues would be here.”
Then I said, “I think we should look
around a bit here—try to see if we can find anything useful.”
The others agreed. We headed off to
different parts of the lighthouse. I thought I’d check out the laboratory that
Dr. Eastbrook had been using. I know a lot about labs and figured I might
notice some things that the others didn’t.
But while I was looking, I was thinking
about how odd it was that a couple of people from earlier in my life—Mr. Leon
and now Aunt Claire—had showed up once again. But they’d not only showed up.
They appeared—how?—to have kept up with my story and had stepped right back
into it, as if no time at all had passed. As if this were a movie they’d
already seen. Or a play they’d already performed in.
I wasn’t yet sure if I should trust them,
either—especially Aunt Claire, who, according to Mrs. Eastbrook, had seemed happy
to be swirling up inside a tornado. Who was this woman? Where had she
come from? What did she want? Was she truly an ally—or was she working to
distract me? Perhaps to destroy me?
I would watch her—and closely so.
***
I didn’t really notice anything too
surprising about the hastily abandoned lab. About what you’d expect: beakers
and test tubes, other standard equipment. But there was one little machine I
noticed and did not recognize. It lay beneath a cupboard, and I have to say, I’d
never seen anything too much like it before. It was about the size of a
toaster, but it had a button on it that, I guessed, was to open it. So I did.
I saw some slots that seemed
designed for test tubes—and some sort of little motor that operated the thing.
I thought it might be important, so I unplugged it and decided to take it with
us. Maybe I could find out more about it on some computer somewhere—or in a
library.
“So what’s that?” John asked when I
found him in the main room.
“I wish I knew. I’m going to put it
into my backpack.” And I did.
The others—who were elsewhere in the
building—did not see what we had done. And I wanted to keep it that way.
***
It was not long before Mr. Leon and
Aunt Claire returned. They said they hadn’t really found anything out of the
ordinary.
“So what do we do next?” I asked.
Mr. Leon looked at me seriously.
“I’m afraid I already know the answer to this next question,” he said, “but
where was the next place you saw Dr. Eastbrook?”
I didn’t want even to think about
it—much less say it. But I knew I had to.
“Niagara Falls,” I said. “It was
Niagara Falls.”
***
Soon, we were outside, moving toward the
Karmann Ghia, and I began to think about how crowded that little car was going
to be with four people in it. But, somehow, we all slipped in as easily as if
were a camper.
Climbing into the back seat, where I
would join him, John muttered, “This is starting to feel like a clown car.” But
he, too, seemed surprised by what seemed like the increasing space of the old
car.
“This is weird,” he whispered to me.
“More than weird,” I replied. “I
have no idea what’s going on.”
“I definitely don’t,” sighed
John. As we were roaring off, he looked at me again. “You seemed upset about
Niagara Falls …”
And so I told him about Gil. About
the Falls.
He didn’t interrupt me at all—the
best sign that a listener is a friend, I’ve always thought. People who
interrupt aren’t really listening to you at all—they’re just waiting to say
what they want to say.
When I finished, he gripped my shoulder
with one of his hands, lightly, and squeezed it. “That’s just a horrible
story,” he said. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to deal with it.”
“I’m not sure I have.” And I turned
to look out the window. And saw only fog.
[i] That film
appeared in July 1985. There were two sequels, the last appearing in November
1989.
[ii] Vickie writes
about all of this near the end of her first volume, I Discover Who I Am.
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